Here I collect interesting links and findings about eclipse and java...

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Support fundraising for LiClipse and PyDev

The last days I have been struggling setting up a development environment to browse and understand some open source projects that contain all kinds of different (programming) languages, like python, javascript, coffeescript, ruby, css, HTML, HTML5, sh, csh, markdown, reStructuredText etc. Unfortunately, eclipse is not really good for that use case.

I have been looking for alternatives to do the code browsing, including the JetBrains products (which are really cool) and emacs (which I use since 30 years). But I don't want to learn a new IDE (JetBrains) nor do I want to go back to the 80ies using emacs.

The real pain with eclipse is to find and install the plug-ins needed to browse and the code. Even if you have the right plug-ins installed it is very painful to set up projects correctly to parse and understand your code.

In fact if you don't have the right plug-in installed, double clicking on an unknown file-type it opens any external tool you operating system has associated with that extension which is really annoying (see bug142228).

LiClipse wants to bridge the gap between heavy weight IDEs and having a plain text editor. I think this is a fantastic idea and therefore I support it with a donation, and if you think it is a good idea, you should do the same... But the fund raising ends Monday 13 May 2013, so you have to hurry and add your contribution now!

I think it is important to support projects like PyDev and LiClipse because eclipse lives form contributions and many of us would do open source work for the fun of it, but somehow we have families and a life that needs funding. The choices are

that you do it in your spare time

you find a company that pays you for doing the project

you create your own startup in the hope to get somehow money in the future (might be very risky and does not pay your bills now)